I'm still sticking with MP3 --aps, because of the wide HW support. I was considering to go for Ogg Vorbis but unfortunately I'm still confused with those many various compiles and "transparent settings" so for me it's not enough clear to move to Ogg Vorbis.

I hope one day it might be clearer and Ogg Vorbis would be more supported by HW then I'll go with Ogg Vorbis...

Exactly te same for meI have 130 giga of mp3 stored in cd and external hd, and lame preset standard or extreme is enough transparent to me.All mp3 are mp3gained and tagged, and reencoding is not in my plan now... too much work!I still go with mp3, because I will keep simple my collection: only mp3= only 1 set of programs (well, 1 set for every OS!)

mpc is definitely not a good solution for portablejust do some decoding test with dBpowerAMP converter

[...]

MPC 146kbps VBR 23X

Something is seriously wrong with either your setup or with dBpowerAMP converter. Musepack should be around 90x on a setup like yours. Perhaps you are dithering? As Digisurfers link shows (and also as general knowledge), Musepack sweeps the floor with every other codec at (undithered) decoding speed, a feature that would make it great for portables. Decoding speed is not what stops MPC from getting portable support.

Musepack of course !it's the best ratio size / qualityit's fast to encodethe name is cool foobar's icon is blue (ok it's a joke)I don't care about portability : I need archive and mpc --q6 or more is for me cd quality .

it's "unknown" by most of people and p2p users.

In general I like to use different softs (such as foobar instead of winamp) or codecs (mpc for audio, rv10 for video and matroska for container).

If it would be interesting to see, how many people already store in lossless, we would need another poll, as most people here voted for their preferred lossy codec, in case they were using lossless, too.

So, for the eternal archiving & HiFi listening/sessions, I use Lossless, respectively a burnt CD. The original Cds are closed away, as those are in danger to get damaged in the long run, and because of the CDDA without error correction possibilities like in data-CD, you have to make a backup of music CDs.I switched over from FLAC to WavPack 4.1 , wavpack.exe -h -m

I extract the CD with EAC & mareo -> WavPack & MPC.The mpc version and the lossless version are stored on different DVD+R's. So, that I have a backup, doubled safety. I add to every album 6% par2 data, blocksize 40000 B, as I have a 'slow PC'.

I have some music in 320k Lame, Fraunhofer 256k-stereo, alt-preset extreme & insane from past, 1st attempts in combining HiFi & PC. As my TYT 2000 clone Grundig 130 (UK: Scan 2000; worldwide various brands, like Daewoo 2000, 5800 etc.) can today even play DVD full of mp3, the Lame 320k (alt-)preset insane is still not totally out of usage !

Group: Members
Posts: 873
Joined: 12-October 01
From: the great wide open
Member No.: 277

wavpack 4.1 in -h high mode needs ca. 3% less space than flac 1.1.1 or 1.1.0 in default mode 5. As speed is nearly comparable equal (by my subjective feeling and my needs, both formats require only minimal cpu power), I took advantage of the new wavpack.

wavpack 4.1 in -h high mode needs ca. 3% less space than flac 1.1.1 or 1.1.0 in default mode 5. As speed is nearly comparable equal (by my subjective feeling and my needs, both formats require only minimal cpu power), I took advantage of the new wavpack.

I see, thanks for reply... And what about Monkey's Audio? I think it's quite fast and has better compression but it requires more CPU power to encode & decode...

--------------------

Sorry for my poor English, I'm trying to get better... ;)"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn't exist."

after alot of ABXing and testing of several lossy formats i finally settled for Musepack. although it seeks a bit slow on my machine for some reason (which i suspect is a hardware problem) i chose it because of its fast encode/decode speeds and transperancy. i still do have tons of mp3s though, also i use vorbis or ACC for <100kbps.

all my music goes on an external harddrive using WavPack -x4 -m prior to encoding to lossy. (-x4 -m, cause the slowdown isnt that bad at all to me and it offers decoding speeds very close to flac and compresses just as good as wavpack -h, in some cases i even end up getting smaller files with -x4 then with -h)

For me, after the a lot of ABX testing with different encoders, and many types of music and killer samples, my decision was vorbis aoTuV b2 and musepack...

For vorbis (aoTuV b2): -q6 for all of my music (jazz and rock in general)

Musepack (1.14): --xtreme --xlevel; too for all of my music.

Particularly I am very impressed with the quality of vorbis aoTuV b2.

In the past I did not like vorbis (1.0.1 and older), but, now, with the new versions and the hard work of the HA vorbis developers, my opinion is very different...I believe (in the present moment) vorbis is a great encoder, and for me, is my encoder of choice...

Musepack is great encoder too, but, , i believe in this moment is limited only for computers.

mp3 for me, lame 3.96.1 from rpm.livna.orgI use aac sometimes for iTunes but usually not.

I use mp3 because it works well just about everywhere, aac doesn't work very well in my Linux desktop yet (the apps that support it skip if you do other stuff, and for encoding - there's faac and nothing else)

mp3 plays nicely in all my media players regardless of the OS, and on my mp3 cd player.So it wind be default. Ogg - I use to use ogg, haven't tried it in awhile - but I found the quicktime plugin for ogg to be slow, it's young, so it's out for me.

I use mp3: LAME 3.96.1 from rarewares with --alt-preset standard. APS is really the only way to pack "transparent" audio that is playable everywhere on any hardware. Actually I preach quite a lot to all people I know about the wonders of --alt-preset standard and I think I doubled the amount of people ripping cd:s in my school.

If I had the Hardware I'd use Vorbis becouse it's better and it's Open, but since I'm stuck with my Sony mp3cd player I'm fine with APS. I wish I had one of those iRiver HD players....

I am sort of surprised to see how many people use musepack and how few use lossless. As musepack has no hardware support, it is a pc only solution. Considering how cheap hard drive storage and blank DVD's have become, it seems to me that lossless should be the preferred method for music storage and playback, even if it is three times the size as MPC @ 6. OK, I realize some people do not have the right hardware for this.

When ripping in burst mode with either dbPoweramp or Foobar2000, and compressing with either flac or Monkey's I can have an average length CD on my hard drive in two minutes. this means that I do not have to keep much stored permanently. Its disposable compressed music. Again, I realize this will not appeal to those who don't mind spending half an hour to rip a scratched CD with EAC in secure mode only to find it has clicks and pops that go away when the rip is done again using burst mode.

I use Vorbis because that's fast and highquality. And what can be better

Musepack is faster and is reputed to be of higher quality than Vorbis at high bitrates, although this may not still hold true. I'm not saying that there isn't still much reason to use Vorbis (it is certainly better quality at ~128kb/s and below, hardware support, etc). It's just that based on the two criteria you mentioned in your post Musepack certainly can be better .